‘Critical bureaucracy’ in action: embedding student voice into school governance

Abstract

This article suggests a model for ‘youth voice’ based on a participatory research methodology, ‘Illuminate’. The article reports on research into the capacity for ‘Illuminate’ to amount to ‘critical bureaucracy’. Critical bureaucracy is presented as an approach to governance activities (here, in schools and further education colleges) which is related to ‘critical pedagogy’ in its reflexivity and sensitivity to issues of policy, power and social justice. The article reports on the testing of the Illuminate model through projects at two schools and a further education college: one on the flexible use of time in the curriculum; another on safety in school students’ lives; and the third on widening participation in the creative arts. Drawing on Freire, Foucault, and Hart, these projects are analysed according to theories of emancipatory research methods, governance, participation, and critical pedagogy, assessing the Illuminate model’s efficacy in terms of a pragmatic approach to critical bureaucracy. The analysis reveals a tension in the adoption of the combination of post-modern theories of governance and an ethic of social justice.

Keywords:

• critical pedagogy
• youth voice
• bureaucracy
• social justice
• governance
• policy
• participation
• Freire
• Foucault

Notes

1. ‘Permanent exclusion’ in England is the term for ‘expulsion’.

2. ‘Critical bureaucracy’ is discussed in more detail below in relation to Freire (1996) and ‘critical pedagogy’.

3. An FE college offers education to students beyond the compulsory schooling age of 16 in England and Wales. FE colleges often deliver a mixture of vocational and academic programmes to young people and mature students.

4. Post-graduate Certificate in Education, providing students with a qualification enabling them to take up positions as Newly Qualified Teachers in schools.

5. The European Economic and Social Research Council.

6. In England and Wales, there are three school terms in a year: September to December; January to April; and April to July.

7. Widening participation work in this context attempts to include a wider range of students in terms of class, ethnicity and gender in further and higher education.

8. This and all other names are pseudonyms for the sake of confidentiality, with the exception of Lewisham College, where participants were comfortable with the name being used.

9. University students employed from the range of disciplines across the college.

10. Here she was referring to an Ofsted rating scale for teachers.

11. At the time of writing, funding for Aim Higher has just been cut by the recently established Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government.

12. ‘Dual heritage’. A student researcher who identified as ‘Black African British’ identified his own terms for ethnic descriptions around the language he and his peers used.

13. The senior English soccer league.

14. Critical consciousness.